How I joined the party

In my family everybody had a story of activism to tell. I was 7 years old and couldn’t wait to make a name for myself.

Politics are complicated in Argentina. There are so many parties that it is hard to keep up with who’s who.

I grew up in a family where everyone was politically active in many different ways. Just like football everybody had an opinion.

My Italian grandfather Alberto was an anarchist and even did jail time because of his illegal activities. My grandpa Salvador was a local leader in a small country town who made his way to the big smoke with political conviction and strong personality. My father and his siblings were all passionate political activists.

When I was born in 1976 there was a coup d'état. The military dictatorship that ensued banned all the parties. Most of my relatives decided to stop their political activities while a few continued on underground.

Fast forward to 1983. I was 7 years old and the general election was coming. Finally the military regime was coming to an end and everybody was excited about having democracy back. We had made it through, but I was conscious that I didn’t have an important act of public rebellion to tell. Not yet.

One afternoon my older brother and me were walking to my grandma’s house when we noticed that a big wall next to the church was plastered with campaign posters of a rival party’s candidate. He was ‘not our guy’ according to my dad.

The photo showed the man smiling, this seemed to us insincere and we decided the posters shouldn’t adorn the main wall of our town. We decided to take matters into our own hands. First we ripped one, then two, soon dozens of posters were falling to the floor. We were absorbed in this and lost track of time. We had just got rid of the last poster when we heard a voice:

-Hey you #$@% kids, what the #$@% are you doing?

We turned around and there he was, the candidate with the insincere smile. He was getting out of a ute with other thugs-type guys. I froze. My heartbeat stopped.I noticed that in the back of his ute there were rolls of posters and buckets with glue. I looked around us, the floor covered with ripped paper. It didn’t look good at all.

“Damn”, I thought to myself. We should have done a ‘short intervention’ and left the scene quickly. Instead we got carried away. Amateurs.

My brother was 12 years old but he looked older, so he was coping most of the verbal abuse from the candidate and his thugs. Eventually he told us.

-Get the #$%@ out of here!

We split. My brother ran towards my grandma’s house and I dashed back home. I was pretty frightened by what had happened but I had a smile on my face and the conviction in my soul we had carried out a heroic act that would change the course of our country’s future forever.

It didn’t. A few days later ‘our’ party lost the elections in a dramatic fashion and ‘not our guy’ became the new Mayor.